Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right… and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

This passage comes from John Adams’s 1765 essay “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” written amid escalating colonial resistance to British policies such as the Stamp Act. Adams argues that political liberty depends on an informed citizenry and that rulers historically try to keep people ignorant in order to dominate them. In the essay he links the preservation of freedom to education, public discussion, and vigilance against arbitrary power. The quoted sentence appears in a section insisting that the people not only may seek knowledge, but possess a natural (even “divine”) right to scrutinize the character and conduct of those who govern them.

Adams frames liberty as inseparable from public knowledge. He goes beyond advocating general education: he insists that citizens have an inherent right to know how their rulers behave, because accountability is the practical safeguard against tyranny. By calling this knowledge “most dreaded and envied,” Adams suggests that elites fear transparency precisely because it empowers ordinary people to judge, resist, and replace corrupt leadership. The piling up of terms—“indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine”—treats political oversight not as a privilege granted by government, but as a fundamental right that precedes government and limits it.